Joe Martignetti, a retired workaholic with a big heart. Martignetti recently purchased an electric-blue blue Chevy Astro with a heavy-duty handicap lift... and immediately began wondering what he was going to do with it. The solution came in the form of a paralyzed woman named Saira Sher, who received an unexpected gift, free of charge!

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Nothing stops a bullet like a job," says the motto of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the country. For the past 20 years, Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who started Homeboy, has counseled more than 12,000 gang members who pass through Homeboy each year to learn job skills and attend therapy sessions on everything from alcohol abuse to anger management. Since leaving his position at the Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles to focus on Homeboy, Boyle has hired ex-gang members to work and run landscaping and plumbing businesses, a child-care center, and even a bakery visited by Prince Charles' business advisors! Though it hasn't been easy, running Homeboy has been an continual practice of humility and compassion. "I don't save people," Boyle says. "I point them in the right direction. I say, 'There's that door. I think if you walked through it, you'd be happier."

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Ultra-Runner with Prosthetic Leg Conquers Running World

“Running was something that was always there,” said Amy Palmiero-Winters, who is missing her left leg below the knee and who is the first amputee to be named to the USA Track and Field team........

She lived in the shanties, the poverty-stricken shanties, but she had a desire far beyond the reach of her environment." Sibahle Tshibika, a ballet dancer from a poor township outside Cape Town, South Africa, is training with a United States ballet company--all because of a documentary, and an email from a caring viewer. "Ghetto Ballet" chronicles four dancers, including Tshibika, as they audition for a dance company in the US. While, Tshibika fails to make the cut at the end of the film, her powerful story moved one viewer to contact the Atlanta Ballet on her behalf. The young dancer shares, "If you believe in something, you should stick on it and be sure that one day it's going to happen--and if it didn't, don't just give up

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Manager's best friend

Dogs improve office productivity

OK. Here’s the plan

THERE are plenty of studies which show that dogs act as social catalysts, helping their owners forge intimate, long-term relationships with other people. But does that apply in the workplace? Christopher Honts and his colleagues at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant were surprised to find that there was not much research on this question, and decided to put that right. They wondered in particular if the mere presence of a canine in the office might make people collaborate more effectively. And, as they told a meeting of the International Society for Human Ethology in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 2nd, they found that it could..........